Weekly Online Lending Snapshot – July 7, 2017

July 7, 2017 ·
Rob Marwanga, MBA Marketing Intern 2017

This week, SoFi announced plans to shut down Zenbank, an online bank that it recently acquired, as the company plans to launch its own online bank. SoFi has recently applied for a bank charter and intends to utilize Zenbank’s tech stack to build a SoFi-branded bank. Business Insider has reported that Goldman Sachs is building an iPhone app for its growing digital retail banking services. Tide, a UK based mobile-first banking service targeting small and medium enterprises, completed a $14 million Series A. It will be working with European lender iwoca to offer loans of up to £100,000. LendingPoint and EzVerify, a tech company powering real-time health insurance verification and benefits info, have partnered up to offer short-term loans for out-of-pocket medical expenses at the point of sale. The service, called ezCarePoint, seeks to predict patients’ out-of-pocket costs and offer loans of about $3,500 to $4,500 and flexible payment plans. It was announced that the three major credit rating agencies, Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian, will drop tax liens and civil judgments this month from some consumers’ credit profiles if the information isn’t complete. This will positively impact millions of Americans since removing these hits to their credit profiles will improve their FICO scores by as much as 20 points. MYbank, an online lender in China in which Alibaba has a significant stake, has disclosed plans to offer financing to the more than 10 million smaller merchants that use Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms. The bank has been able to more than quadruple its lending through 2016, taking its outstanding loans to $4.9 billion. In securitizations, Kroll Bond Rating Agency has assignedpreliminary ratings for two classes of notes worth $499 million issued by SoFi Consumer Loan Program (SCLP 2017-4). Classes A and B were assigned preliminary ratings of AA (sf) and A (sf) respectively.

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